(5) The beginner may now congratulate himself on the fact that more than half his work is done. He will return to his first chapter. Perhaps he will leave it as it stands; more probably he will decide that by rewriting it he can improve it out of all knowledge. And so, chapter by chapter, deliberately, using time like a spendthrift, he will rewrite the entire book. The hasty draft, in addition to performing the functions of a draft, will serve to keep him in touch with the story as a whole, and by its bulk and completeness will afford him always an ocular proof of what he can do when he tries; such a proof is very sustaining in periods of depression and apparently hopeless difficulty. Let me add that, during the final writing, the beginner should frequently read and read again the finished portions, and also the remaining part of the draft.
I shall now deal with various details of composition.
Characterisation.
The tyro usually thinks that in fictional writing there is a special conscious business of “drawing the character.” There is not. Characters can not be “drawn”; at any rate they cannot be “drawn” convincingly. They can only be shown in action. As long as the character performs no mental or physical act, the character will not live. You may assert that your hero is clever or brave till your nib is worn out, but you will not convince a single reader of the fact until you make your hero act in a clever or brave manner. Characterisation can be achieved solely through the creator’s own clear vision of the character.
When you have got your character on the scene, you must force yourself to see and realise him as an actual person. It is your own vision of him that counts. Let me reiterate: It is your own vision of him that counts. If he is clear to you, his sayings and doings will, without conscious management on your part, combine together harmoniously to produce a clear vision in the mind of the reader. If he is not clear to you, the effect on the reader will be correspondingly blurred. There is no other method of arriving at characterisation. Of course a certain amount of exterior description and of incidental explanation or exposition is necessary. But such passages must be regarded merely as an adventitious aid to characterisation; they are not the characterisation itself.
Descriptions of figures are often useful, but descriptions of facial detail are almost invariably quite futile. If your heroine is beautiful, say so as briefly as possible; the rendering of facial beauty is the province of the painter, not of the artist in words. Marked peculiarities of feature or gesture should be noted, but on no account should they be frequently insisted on, so as to “label” a character. The “labelling” dodge is a bad one. It gives no real individuality to the person “labelled,” and affords no insight to the reader. You may say that your villain, John Smith, has a trick of exclaiming, “Well, really!” And you may compel him to exclaim, “Well, really!” each time he opens his mouth. But the device will do nothing whatever to assist the reader to realise what John Smith truly is. If you encounter in the street a man with one ear every day for a twelvemonth, you may know nothing about him at the end except the fact that he has one ear.
Characterisation, the feat of individualising the characters, is the inmost mystery of imaginative literary art. It is of the very essence of the novel. It never belongs to this passage or that It is implicit in the whole. It is always being done, and is never finished till the last page is written.
Dialogue.
Beginners experience a difficulty in deciding when to use dialogue and when to use simple narration. Remember that the aim of the novelist is to tell a story, and to tell it with the greatest economy of means. If the facts to be related can be given more succinctly and forcibly in dialogue, then dialogue should be employed. Sometimes the novelist cannot come to a decision without experimenting in both methods. It is better to use too little dialogue than too much. At specially dramatic points a few lines of dialogue are sometimes of immense value. Beginners often fall into the error of starting a conversation between characters for a certain purpose, and then continuing it after the purpose is achieved, merely because in real life the conversation would not have ended when the purpose was achieved. This is bad art. The novelist’s business is not at all to set down complete portions of real life, but only such fragments as suit his artistic ends. When a conversation has served its purpose, stop it instantly; if advisable you may summarise its conclusion in a few words of narration.
Dialogue in fiction cannot have the fulness of dialogue in life. That is to say, it cannot be entirely realistic. It must be rigorously selected. The novelist will not write down, therefore, what his characters, considered as actual people, probably would have said under the given circumstances. Having discovered for himself what they probably would have said, he will manipulate and compress it so as both to effect his artistic purpose and to deceive the reader into an illusion of reality. The illusion of reality will not be given unless the novelist, while departing from what the characters would have said, is careful to set down nothing but what they could have said. Thus, for a simple example, if he makes a peasant use a five-syllable verb, he may be as ingenious as he likes, but he will destroy the illusion of reality.
In the employment of dialect the novelist should never even approach realistic exactitude. The merest indication of dialectal peculiarity in a spoken sentence should content him. The speech of educated persons is full of small divergences from absolute correctness, but no novelist ever dreams of recording the hundredth part of such divergences. To do so would be to irritate and confuse the reader. In dealing with those more marked eccentricities of speech which constitute dialect, the novelist must exercise a similar discretion.
Landscape, &c.
No rules can be laid down in regard to the part which should be played in a novel by descriptions of landscape or other surroundings. Until the nineteenth century novels contained almost no descriptions of surroundings. At the present time it cannot be denied that they often contain vastly too much descriptive work. The beginner must act according to his own interest and his own vision. If his lovers are walking down a country lane, and it seems to him that the human figures are essentially part of the lane, and the lane interests him, then he must describe the lane by the light of his own sympathy with it. If his lovers are seated in a rose-shaded corner of a Belgravian drawing-room, and appear to him in unison with, and inseparable from, these surroundings of a luxurious and decadent civilisation, then he must describe the drawing-room; perhaps the pattern of the wallpaper or the curves of the coal-box may help him to define his characters. If, on the other hand, he is preoccupied only with his lovers, and sees nothing but them—sees them apart from the world, like figures against a background of brown paper—then he must not force himself to invent detailed environments merely because he has noticed that Mr. Henry James gives ten pages to the interior of a local post-office, or Mr. Eden Phillpotts four pages to a mountain stream. He must act fearlessly on his own initiative; no one can choose for him; he will be judged solely by the results he attains.
Episodes.
It may be said roughly that a novel is an organic succession of episodes, each of which has a little life and entity of its own. The beginner must severely interrogate each episode as he does it, and put it through a sort of cross-examination in order to justify its existence. An episode may be a beautiful and effective episode, but if it does not directly help forward the story as a whole, then it has no right to exist Every episode must directly assist the progress of the tale. It is useless to urge that such and such an episode, though it does not help the actual story, illustrates a character or confirms an atmosphere. The subsidiary functions of an episode may be various, but whatever they are they must always combine harmoniously with the principal function of every episode, which is to tell the tale. When, for any reason whatever, you cease to tell the tale, you are sinning not only against policy, but against the classic principles of art. When an episode has been written, it is advisable to inquire: